by Penny Jordan
Certainly, they both wanted children, but they had agreed that they were too young for them as yet. Luc wanted to wait until he had finished his studies, and from the tone of his conversation Belle had guessed that he would want her to give up her own job once they did have a family. She was not so sure that was something she would want to do, but there was plenty of time for her to talk Luc round to her point of view.
It was a pity that the bed had been so expensive, otherwise she might have been able to treat them to a visit to the January sales…
They desperately needed a decent sofa, and Belle rather liked the idea of them having two instead of the traditional one and a couple of armchairs. The cottage had a good-sized sitting room-cum-family room, as well as its large kitchen-cum-dining room, and on the other side of the entrance hall there was, much to her delight, a very respectably sized and pretty drawing room which ran the full length of the house. Plenty of scope for her home-making talents there. And the fact that the previous owners had been elderly meant that none of the attractive original features had been removed.
‘You’re looking very pleased with yourself,’ Luc commented as he bent to kiss the top of her head and reach past her for the coffee pot.
‘Mmm…’ she agreed lazily, arching her neck and inviting him without a word to nuzzle the soft warm skin there.
‘What have you got me for Christmas? I hope it’s something very special,’ she teased him, knowing full well that the only thing she really wanted from him, the gift she valued above everything else, was the one she already had: the gift of his love for her, his commitment to her.
‘Well, I might just…’ he began, and then stopped theatrically, his eyes sparkling with love and happiness as he teased her back. ‘No guessing, though. You’re just going to have to wait until tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow.’ Belle pouted. ‘But I thought we’d… I’m going to give you my present today. Tomorrow we’re going to your parents…’
‘Not until lunchtime,’ Luc reminded her.
‘It’s going to be a very busy time,’ Belle sighed. ‘First dinner with your family, and then we’re going to my parents on Boxing Day.’
The two families, who had not known one another before Luc and Belle had met, had become firm friends, and they lived close enough to make visiting one another quite easy, often sharing their homes with each other’s families at special times like Christmas. On Christmas Day night Belle’s parents, her elder sister and her husband and their two young children were joining Luc’s parents and other members of his family. As a country vicar, Luc’s father lived in a vicarage more than large enough to house everyone overnight, even if his small stipend meant that he could never afford to comfortably heat the vast Victorian church property.
Belle liked Luc’s family, even if she sometimes found them a trifle unworldly compared with the people she mixed with in her working life. Certainly their values and beliefs were very much in tune with those of her own parents, and she particularly liked Luc’s uncle and his wife, and their thirteen-year-old son who shared so much of a family resemblance with Luc that Belle had not been surprised when Luc’s mother had told her that Andy looked just the same as Luc had done at his age.
Luc’s father had studied theology at Cambridge, and there was a tradition in the family of its male members being Cambridge men.
Because they were spending so much time away from home over Christmas, Luc and Belle had agreed that it would be a waste to have a real Christmas tree, and one of Belle’s clients had presented her with an artistic and very expensive Christmas arrangement from one of London’s top florists, made up of bare twigs and glass baubles, which had caused Luc to raise his eyebrows a little.
‘Don’t you like it?’ Belle had asked him.
‘It’s…it’s very artistic,’ Luc had replied cautiously, and then had added a rueful admission, ‘At home we always have a huge tree loaded with masses of stuff. Not very arty, I suppose, but it always seems…right. Vicars’ wives always have to recycle everything, and Ma used to encourage me to make my own decorations when I was small… Not very aesthetic, I know, but for me the real spirit of Christmas is the thought behind the gift, not its material value.’
He was right, of course, and Belle knew it, shared his sentiments, but somehow he had made her feel that her values were glossy and worthless and even, in some belittling way, that she was glossy and worthless too.
Today, though, was Christmas Eve, and very soon their own special Christmas present was going to arrive. And every Christmas from now on, when they woke up in their special bed, when they made love in it, they would remember this, their first Christmas in their new home. Belle couldn’t wait to see the bed with its special headboard in situ, to polish and admire it.
It was almost lunchtime when the van finally arrived in the narrow country lane outside their house.
‘What’s this?’ Luc frowned as the driver got out. ‘They must be looking for somewhere else. We haven’t ordered anything…’
‘Yes, we have,’ Belle corrected him excitedly, craning her neck so that she could see out of the window as the men went to the rear of the van. ‘Well, I have. It’s our Christmas present…well, mine to you…to us…to the house. It’s the bed, Luc, the one I told you about…with the wonderful headboard,’ she hurried on.
‘The one we agreed we wouldn’t have because it was too expensive?’ Luc asked her quietly.
But Belle was oblivious to the cold undertone to his voice, too busy watching what was going on outside the window to be aware of the hurt look in his eyes as she agreed flippantly, ‘That’s the one.’
‘You went ahead and bought it without telling me, despite what we’d agreed…’
Now Belle did look at him, alerted to his feelings by the ominous tone of his voice.
‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ she told him. ‘It’s a present…a surprise. Luc…what is it? Where are you going?’ she demanded frantically as he turned his back on her and started to walk towards the back door.
‘Luc, come back,’ she pleaded, but it was too late, and she couldn’t run after him because the delivery men were already coming up the path with their new bed.
* * *
Luc would come round when he saw how wonderful their bedroom looked with the bed and its headboard proudly adorning it, Belle decided two hours later, when the men had gone and she was standing in the doorway of their bedroom admiring her new acquisition. They would need to get some different bedding now, she acknowledged, frowning a little as she studied the pretty floral set they had been given as a wedding present. Somehow it just didn’t do the new bed justice.
Luc had sanded and polished the old floorboards shortly after they had moved in, and they certainly set the bed off perfectly. It was, she knew, the kind of bed that demanded heavy Irish linen sheets scented with lavender, old-fashioned bed linen, all the traditional touches.
Luc would love that, waking up smelling of lavender… Luc…where was he? He had been gone a long time. She hoped he’d…
It was almost half an hour later when another van pulled up outside the house, a much shabbier, older one than the one which had delivered their new bed and its accoutrements, and, to her astonishment, she saw Luc climbing out of the driver’s door.
‘Luc.’ She went to the front door and opened it, calling out anxiously to him. ‘Where have you been?’
‘To get your Christmas present,’ he told her grimly.
Her Christmas present. In that old van… What on earth…? Warily she walked to the front gate and opened it, staring into the back of the van as Luc unlocked and raised the shutter door.
‘What is it? What have you got in there?’ she asked him uncertainly.
‘I’ve already told you. Your Christmas present.’
As the last of the fading daylight filled the van and she saw inside it Belle’s heart gave a shocked bound. There, in pieces, inside the van, was an old-fashioned bedframe, an obviously newly bought mattress
and, tucked along one side of it, covered in a piece of old sheeting was the unmistakable shape of a wooden headboard.
‘Luc…what have you done—’ she began, and then stopped as he turned round and she saw his face.
She had never seen him look so bleak…so distant…so alien from her and to her.
‘Very much the same as you’ve done. I’ve bought us a Christmas present. A new bed. For us…for you…’ he told her in a voice that was icily polite and icily distant.
‘That isn’t new…the frame’s old…’ Belle began defensively. ‘It looks…’
‘It looks what?’ Luc challenged her. ‘It looks as though your colleagues…and your clients…would laugh at it, turn their materialistic designer noses up at it. Well, for your information, this bed belonged to my grandparents. They slept in it…cherished it…cared for it and valued it, just as my parents have done.’
‘It’s… It’s…’ Belle just didn’t know what to say, and then, as Luc climbed into the van, the sheeting slipped off the headboard and the colour left her face completely, Unlike the frame itself, the headboard was quite plainly new. She could tell that because of the pretty carving on it, entwining their initials and the date of their marriage.
‘Luc… You bought…’ she began, but Luc was already shaking his head.
‘I bought nothing apart from the mattress,’ he told her grimly. ‘The wood, good solid English oak, belonged to the father of one of my pupils. He gave it to me in exchange for his son’s tuition. I did the carving myself. It isn’t as fancy nor, I dare say, as desirable as the one you’ve bought, but…’
‘You carved it…’ Belle stopped him. ‘You carved it…’
‘Yes.’ Luc told her curtly, pushing the cloth back over it. ‘But of course I realise that it won’t come anywhere near to matching the one you‘ve bought. The one I couldn’t afford to buy you. It doesn’t matter what I do or what I say, what I give you…how much I love you. The fact remains that you’re the one who’s supporting us both, financing us both…’
‘Luc, what does that matter?’ Belle protested. ‘And besides, that’s only temporary. When you get your fellowship…
‘Oh, Luc, I love you so very much, and I love the headboard as well,’ Belle told him tenderly—and she meant it.
* * *
Luc’s gift to her, his bed, was installed in their bedroom whilst the one she had bought was relegated to one of the guest bedrooms. They made up their quarrel, and the ones that followed it, but with each one the fabric of their marriage grew a little thinner, until eventually the day came when neither of them could be bothered to repair the worn patches any longer.
The crux came one weekend, when Belle arrived home early from an overseas conference to find that Luc, who had attended a dinner party in Cambridge the night before, had stayed over in Harriet Parish’s rooms.
Luc protested in vain that it was all completely innocent, that he had simply had too much to drink to want to risk driving, that he loved her and that Harriet was simply a fellow student…a friend…
In the row that followed they said so many ugly and hurtful things to one another that Belle knew there was no going back. Not this time…
‘You’re so damn materialistic, you wouldn’t know real value if it hit you on the head,’ Luc accused her at one point during their argument. ‘Money, money—that’s all that matters to you.’
‘Perhaps it would matter more to you if you were the one who earned it,’ Belle retaliated. ‘It’s all very well for you, sitting up there above the rest of us in your ivory tower, Luc, but you seem to forget that without my earnings there would be no ivory tower for you to live in…’
And so it went on, the pair of them tearing at the precious fabric of their vulnerable marriage, rending it, ripping it, destroying it, in a frenzy of bitterness and petty resentments.
Belle moved out of the house that weekend and she never moved back.
Six weeks later she filed for divorce, refusing to even discuss with Luc any possibility of them getting back together. Ironically, the only thing she took from their marital home was the bed and headboard—not the one she had bought, that she had left behind, and for all she knew it was still there in the house with Luc, who had bought out her share of their marital home.
No, the headboard, the one that still graced the head of the bed in her small London home, was the one that Luc had made for her. Not that she had intended that to happen. The men she had sent to collect the other headboard and bed from the spare room had made a mistake, and somehow or other she had never bothered to correct it.
CHAPTER TWO
‘I MUST admit that Mum was stunned when you said that Luc had come round to deliver the invitation to you himself,’ Joy, the happy bride, was saying now. ‘I mean, we realised soon enough about the mistake. What on earth did he say? You must have been so surprised to open the door to see him there…’
‘Mmm…’
‘Luc, I was just saying to Belle that she must have been really surprised to open her front door and find you there,’ Joy repeated breezily as her new husband’s cousin suddenly materialised at Belle’s side, apparently oblivious to the interest the fact that the two of them were standing amicably together was causing amongst their fellow wedding guests.
Luc’s dark river-green eyes met Belle’s honey-gold ones, exchanging a silent message.
‘What on earth did you say to her? I mean, you hadn’t spoken to one another for years…’
‘Joy…’ Andy cautioned his new bride, explaining to Belle and Luc, ‘I think it must be the champagne on top of an empty stomach. She told me when we walked back down the aisle that she’d had three glasses whilst she was getting ready this morning…’
‘No, four…’ Joy corrected him, and then giggled.
‘Darling, the photographer wants you,’ her mother announced, coming up to the newly married pair and urging them to follow her.
‘Oh, no more photographs,’ Joy was complaining as her mother led her away.
‘Saved by the flashbulb,’ Luc commented humorously to Belle after they had gone.
‘Mmm… You could hardly have told her what really happened, could you?’
‘What? That you took one look at me, went white and practically fainted into my arms,’ Luc commented.
‘I’d been in bed with flu. I hadn’t eaten anything for three days…’ Belle defended herself. ‘Besides,’ she added slyly, ‘I don’t think you’d have wanted me telling Andy that you carried me upstairs to bed and started to undress me…’
‘I did no such thing…’
‘Yes, you did. My robe—’
‘Your robe came off when I trod on the belt you had left undone as I picked you up. And I had to take you upstairs. All you have downstairs is your garage and an entry hall… And besides, if you will go completely naked under your robe… It was a freezing cold February day. I just wanted to get you somewhere warm. You frightened me to death, passing out like that. Mind you, I wasn’t surprised. You were far too thin and frail…’
‘I told you, I’d been ill. Which is why—’
‘Goodness me, you two look very cosy. How long have you been married now? It must be over ten years, and still no children! Well, they say, don’t they, that if you’ve none to make you laugh then you’ve none to make you cry?’
Great-Aunt Alice…
Belle gave Luc a speaking look above the elderly lady’s head. There was no point in trying to explain her error, especially not when….
‘Aunt Alice…there you are…’ Carol, Belle’s sister and the mother of the bride, came hurrying back, looking harassed as she put her arm around their elderly relative.
‘Darling, I’m so sorry about all of this. You’ll never guess what she’s done now,’ she hissed in a whisper to Belle, but before she could elucidate, David, her husband, was hurrying up to her telling her that the caterers wanted to speak urgently to her.
‘Shame,’ Luc commented, giving Belle a small smile as
he watched his ex-sister-in-law’s departing back. ‘Now we’ll never know just what it is that Great-Aunt Alice has done…’
‘You mean what else she’s done,’ Belle corrected him drolly, returning his smile with a look in her eyes that caused a passing waitress, who was not aware of their divorced status, to reflect rather ruefully on the enviable ability of some couples to keep a passionate intensity in their relationship which was now only an increasingly blurred memory in her own. Mind you, she had to acknowledge fairly, it would be a very odd woman indeed who did not feel a twinge of sensual female excitement at the sight of a man as attractive as Luc. Her own husband, kind man though he was, was not exactly charismatic.
‘Mmm… I must say I was rather taken aback when I received the wedding invitation addressed to both of us.’
‘It was very thoughtful of you to take the trouble to deliver it by hand,’ Belle responded mock demurely, her honey-gold eyes dancing with laughter—and something else, something deeper and warmer that made Luc’s breath catch slightly in his throat. Belle had always had that special something about her, a warmth and energy, a vibrancy. He had noticed it about her the very first time they had met
‘I was in London anyway,’ Luc reminded her, attempting to make light of the incident, but, like hers, his eyes glowed hot with remembered emotion, giving him away.
‘It’s rather warm in here. What do you say to us taking the opportunity to get a little fresh air before we go in for the wedding breakfast?’ Luc suggested.
‘People will talk,’ Belle pointed out to him. ‘They’ll wonder what’s going on…’
‘Mmm…’ Luc agreed, placing his hand on the back of her waist and gently guiding her towards the exit to the hotel’s gardens.
‘I’m glad to see that you’ve put some weight back on.’
‘I’d been ill,’ Belle reminded him.